The Royal Touch
Freeman, Franklin
The Royal Touch Physician to the courts of Renaissance Europe. by Franklin Freeman Truth is the criterion of historical study," wrote G.M. Trevelyan, "but its impelling motive is poetic. Its...
...Trevor-Roper writes eloquently of Mayerne's righteous anger...
...He is a methodical, meticulous researcher...
...Both of his sons—one of whom he wanted to become a gentleman farmer, the other a physician— rebelled, lived dissolute lives, and died in their mid-twenties...
...Often he would begin an apparently systematic treatise...
...Hugh Trevor-Roper's posthumous biography of Sir Theodore de Mayerne illustrates this synthesis with a style not spinning on its own metaphysical deconstructionist wheels, but a truth-seeking, straightforward, stately style, passionate but decorous...
...The new queen, Marie de Medici, and her court worked from France to secure the murderer's pardon...
...But he never returned to his estate— Charles I would not let him—and he never completed the works he aspired to write: It seems that he had a psychological incapacity to complete a work...
...Expelled from France [because of spying], and chary of returning to that scene of his humiliation, he discovered, in the agonizing autumn and winter of 1621-2, a new centre of activity in Switzerland," then in the throes of the Thirty Years' War...
...In 1620, at age 47, Mayerne took up the study of art—no one is sure exactly why—eventually producing, based on written sources and consultations with artists, including Rubens who painted his portrait shortly after meeting him in 1629, what art historians call "the Mayerne manuscript...
...Trevor-Roper comments: "If a man was afflicted with venereal disease, he did not stand nicely upon sectarian positions...
...Like many men of encyclopedic ambitions, he lacked the architectonic faculty...
...He emphasizes that, in history, there is never just one cause for any event: He is not a reductionist in the name of politics, science, economics, psychology, or religion, but acknowledges all of them, and shows how they work together to make history...
...He was born of French Huguenot exiles in Geneva, where his godfather was Calvin's successor, Beza...
...Mayerne withdrew "into proud, personal reserve," an example of "'interior emigration.'" His first wife died in 1628, and Mayerne sent his eldest son, Henri, on a Grand Tour, preparing the ground (he thought) for retirement to his estate in Switzerland, where he wanted to "give to the world, the works which I have long owed to it...
...But to what end...
...It shows Mayerne not in his usual guise, as a courtier, whose perfect bedside manner carried him effortlessly into the confidence of even Catholic princes, but as an Old Testament prophet, standing firmly, even arrogantly, on his own principles or interest, and defying human power...
...Through his friendships and connections made at Montpellier—"the road of patronage," Franklin Freeman is a writer in Maine...
...Sir Theodore de Mayerne (15731655) was court physician for France's Henry IV, England's James I and Charles I, as well as the physician, it appears, of at least half (if not more) of the nobility of Europe, hence Trevor-Roper's title...
...It was the doomed ambition of his life...
...In 1628 the Huguenots rebelled, Richelieu determined to defeat them, which he did in the following year...
...Many of his cases involved the treatment of venereal disease...
...Marie de Medici let him go on the understanding that it was a temporary appointment, but both sides knew he would probably not be coming back...
...Mayerne learned of this and wrote to Geneva...
...Hugh Trevor-Roper, the classic scholar, tells the reader when he is speculating, when he knows or does not know something...
...Rather, it seems that he was animated by a real thirst for knowledge and a desire to leave a record of the chemical discoveries to which he had been inspired by the teaching of Paracelsus, and which he had not realized in both medicine and the arts...
...By 1629," Trevor-Roper writes, "the whole concept of international Protestantism had become a chimera...
...Europe's Physician The Various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne by Hugh Trevor-Roper Edited by Blair Worden Yale, 464 pp., $35 Trevor-Roper calls it—he set up practice in Paris by 1597 and was soon the third royal doctor for Henry IV Mayerne became a very popular physician among the nobility, both Protestant and Catholic...
...Perhaps he had been made to publish his first book—[a] little guidebook to Europe which he had written as an undergraduate—too soon...
...Mayerne had considered going to England...
...Mayerne's mental world had passed...
...His most famous patient, in hindsight, was Armand-Jean du Plessis, bishop of Lucon, later to be known as Cardinal Richelieu...
...Doomed also was Mayerne's desire to leave behind a dynasty living on his estate in Berne...
...Its poetry consists in its being true...
...He "might declare, in his letters, that he did not meddle with affairs of state, but who could believe that...
...Trevor-Roper's last paragraph, summing up Mayerne's final days and the "melancholy tale" of the way his possessions and legacy were fought over, rises to a blend of eloquence and shrewdness: Thus were Mayerne's hopes thwarted, his fortune dispersed, his writings overlooked and then inadequately published...
...He was conscious of having a philosophy, but he could not organize it into a coherent form...
...But never, after his Apologia of 1603, would he give anything of his own to the press...
...He would write a book...
...Mayerne studied philosophy at Heidelberg, then medicine at the University of Montpellier...
...And it seeks the truth about the life and times of one of the most remarkable historical figures of whom you have probably never heard...
...He was not himself an artist or a craftsman: He did not intend to exercise the arts that he studied...
...and the Paracelsian and Hermetic ideas which in Mayerne's time had prompted innovative thought and practical experiment had become, in the scientific revolution, separated from it and discredited by it...
...It is the syndrome of the puritan hero's rebel son...
...Mayerne had been secretly negotiating with the English and, in April 1611, just after he had learned of his brother's murder, received a letter from James I asking him to be court physician...
...then, in 1611, his brother Henri was killed in Geneva by La Roche-Giffart, and the authorities in Geneva wavered...
...If they prosecuted the Catholic Frenchman, they feared, the Huguenots would again be persecuted...
...Though his father, Louis de Mayerne (author of The General History of Spain) had literary aspirations for his son, Theodore from an early age wanted only to be a physician: "I sucked the milk of medicine in my cradle . . . nor could any advice from parents or friends ever divert my mind to any other studies...
...The governments of Berne and Geneva enlisted his assistance in negotiating with King James for help to protect them from the Duke of Savoy, so Mayerne returned to England: Reading Mayerne's letters to Geneva and Berne, we have the impression of a man who thoroughly enjoyed the exercise of influence and power...
...The shaping influences of his thought and outlook had disappeared...
...Yet a man had been slain...
...The Calvinist militancy and the ideological confrontations of the era of the wars of religion were over...
...By the end of the century, more than his belongings had suffered decline or neglect...
...So his tone of voice is peremptory...
...There is something splendid in this last glimpse of the Huguenot court-doctor, writing from the court itself, to demand that a foreign republic show no respect to persons and should disregard the letters of his queen...
...In 1610 Henry IV was assassinated and life at court was transformed...
...his judgments are well balanced...
...He is no longer merely the suave successful medical pioneer, the friend of apothecaries and surgeons: he is the masterful politician, instructing rulers and ambassadors, wielding authority, dictating policy...
...There we find the synthesis of the literary and scientific views of history...
...Often he would speak of his plans to publish his whole medical philosophy...
...A servant in name only, he recommends, patronises, even commands his distant masters: for he speaks to them in the name of a greater prince, their protector, King James...
...Mayerne blamed his wife's lenient Dutch family, but, writes Trevor-Roper, "we may see it . . . as Nature's revenge against a powerful and exacting father, and we may note that he was not the only great Huguenot individualist to suffer this revenge...
...He eventually tired of court life and settled in Berne...
...Trevor-Roper describes it as "an indispensable document in the history of Baroque painting, and indeed in the technique of oil painting from the time of the Flemish primitives to the time of Rubens...
...Officially Mayerne and the other Huguenots at court were tolerated, but extreme pressure was put on them to convert to Catholicism...
...In fact, he loved to be in the centre of things...
...It is difficult to detect an economic motive in this case...
...and now, once again, he was...
...This too was a permanent part of his character...
...his insights into human nature ring true...
...Mayerne traveled to England, weathered attacks from envious doctors, built up a thriving practice, went on diplomatic trips for James, and was spied on and banned from France for carrying secret messages from the English king...
Vol. 12 • April 2007 • No. 31
